Va! Laisse couler mes larmes (Les larmes qu'on ne pleure pas) (Werther)

Massenet drafted Werther between 1885 and 1887, after visiting Wetzlar, where Goethe had set his epistolary novel. Léon Carvalho of the Opéra-Comique turned it down as too gloomy for his audience, and the score waited. The Vienna Hofoper, wanting a successor to Manon, took it instead, and the premiere was given in German translation on 16 February 1892; Paris heard it the following year. The opera renounces spectacle almost entirely: four acts of interior weather, in which the orchestra carries what the characters cannot say aloud, and the December setting of the last act does the rest.